Tyndareus then reproaches to Orestes "[phrase omitted]" (531-2 ; [you] are paying your mother's price by rushing about in fits of frenzy and panic).
(15) Ovid's version does mention Oebalus, but when Ovid calls Hyacinth a "Son of Oebalus" this merely signifies Hyacinth was a Spartan as Oebalus was the famous king of Sparta who fathered
Tyndareus, Icarius, and Hippocoon.
According to some tales, Leda had two mortal children with her husband King
Tyndareus and two immortal children with the Greek god Zeus (Jove), who came to her in the form of a swan.
Hence, as Saville accurately points out, the translation attributes agency to a figure who is traditionally associated with passivity: "Avoiding representations of Leda as the unsuspecting wife of
Tyndareus whose secluded bathing spot is slyly invaded by the disguised Zeus, Bradley and Cooper choose an image of thorough self-possession.
Starting with the journey Patroclus makes with his father to
Tyndareus' citadel as a suitor to Helen, where she makes her choice of Menelaus, the novel moves to the meeting of Patroclus and Achilles at the court of Peleus at Phthia after Patroclus is exiled there as a punishment for killing a boy in a fight.
Pollux and Castor were sons of Leda, who was wife of the mortal king
Tyndareus and lover of Zeus, the chief god.
A similar contradictory effect is produced in Orestes when
Tyndareus criticises Orestes for not having prosecuted his mother for murdering his father (Or.
In order to help the students with this information, I gave a lecture on the causes of the Trojan war given in the mythological tradition: the Treaty of
Tyndareus, Judgment of Paris, marriage of Peleus to Thetis, etc.
According to the Greek myth,
Tyndareus, Helen's father, made her suitors promise to defend whomever she decided to marry if he were wronged.
The usual story of the war's origins is familiar, of course: the beauty contest among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite; Aphrodite's bestowal of the beautiful Helen on Paris as a reward for his judgment in her favor; his carrying off of Helen and of Menelaus' possessions to Troy; and the oaths of
Tyndareus that obliged Helen's former suitors to help Menelaus retrieve her and punish her abductor.
In Jan's Leda Shows her daughter Helen to
Tyndareus (1660; Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem) the theatrically exaggerated event is staged in an unattractive, obscure garden.
Because Helen is intent upon identifying with Olympus, rather than the backwater kingdom of Leda's husband King
Tyndareus, she needs to stress that no daughter of
Tyndareus's brother Icarius could really be her "cousin." Furthermore Helens performance of haughtiness and refusal to be restrained by petty "human" morals can be understood as a demonstration that she actually is Zeus's daughter.
